I made some Rhubarb wine following this recipe:

On 6/8/08:
3 lbs rhubarb
2 1/4 lbs sugar

Placed sugar on rhubarb and put in primary fermentor.

6/13/08:
Placed the following in the 2ndary fermentor.
1 tsp champagne yeast
11.5 oz white grape concentrate
1 tsp yeast nutriend

8/9/08: racked

11/6/08 placed in 5 wine bottles.

Tonight I opened one and I was very disappointed. It began to fizz like crazy, had hardly any taste. It almost tasted like a poorly made champagne. I have a couple questions.

1. What went wrong? I wanted a smooth wine.

2. How do you know if you should not be drinking the results of our labor? I don't want to go blind or die from my wine.

3. It seems as though the wine I'm making really has no taste. Do you double the fruit in your recipes? I'm getting a little frustrated as I would really like to have some wine to drink this summer.

Thanks for any suggestions.

~Tj~

Thank you so much for the information. I decided to open all 5 bottles for fear of them exploding. I found this interesting. I like a dry wine, but my husband likes his wine sweeter. So in 3 of the bottles I added some sweetener that I got from a wine supplier who told me that it would not restart the fermentation. Those three were the only three that fizzed. So now, I'm thinking it may have had something to do with that sweetener.

~Tj~

Casey
"Sean McDonagh Racing"